14 DAY TRIAL // A while ago, Miguel de Icaza, Novell's vice president of development and the lead developer of the Mono project, has shared with the Mono development community his plans of making an experimental Linux-based Silverlight browser plug-in. These days, he announced the successful results of no less than 21 days of rough coding.
"The past 21 days have been some of the most intense hacking days that I have ever had and the same goes for my team that worked 12 to 16 hours per day every single day --including weekends-- to implement Silverlight for Linux in record time" says Miguel regarding the conceiving of this amazing plug-in.
Miguel de Icaza presented the demo of Microsoft's new technology for Rich Internet Application development at Microsoft's Mix07 conference that took place in Paris. One of the most interesting aspects related to this plug-in would be the fact that, as it was previously stated, it is compatible even with the new 1.1 version of Silverlight. There was a lot of work to be done in order to make this plug-in work. Starting with the audio in the media player which necessitated fixing, rewriting of the video playback engine and continuing with the works for an Expat-based XAML parser (according to Icaza, they've used a small XML parser in order to make this a small download as well).
There are also many other Novell employees (among which Atsushi Enomoto, JB Evain, Marek Safar, Mark Probst) who indirectly worked on Moonlight. Although Silverlight is intended to be used in a web browser, Miguel stated that he considers it very useful for the "Linux desktop programmers to have Silverlight reusable as a widget".
"We already have been talking to a few folks about how we can help them improve and spice up their desktop applications with Silverlight. Obvious choices are all the existing Gnome/Mono based applications, but ever since we got started on this, the idea of writing a "Media Center" sort of UI has been making the rounds".